33. Success vs Mental Strength: What Runners Get Wrong
So many ultra runners believe that mental strength is a shield against failure or a way to avoid the disappointment of a DNF. But what if that belief is the very thing holding you back?
In this episode, I’m breaking down one of the most persistent misconceptions I hear from runners: the idea that mentally strong runners always finish their races. If you’ve been chasing mental toughness like it’s the missing ingredient to your success, this conversation might change everything.
We’ll look at why mental strength has been misunderstood, why success doesn’t automatically create confidence, and why failure doesn’t mean you aren’t mentally strong. Most importantly, we’ll talk about the real purpose of mental strength and why it’s far more valuable than a clean race record or a perfect finish.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why success doesn’t automatically build mental strength.
How success without mental strength can actually hurt your self-confidence long-term.
How DNFs can make you stronger rather than weaker.
Why continued exposure to negative emotions builds unshakable mental strength.
Why emotional resilience matters more than a perfect race.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Today a new client told me, "I want mental strength because mentally strong runners always finish their races." But this is a common, powerful misconception that works against you in races. And today we're fixing it.
Welcome to Unstoppable Ultra Runner, the podcast for ultra runners who refuse to let anything hold them back. I’m your host, Susan Donnelly, veteran of over 150 100-mile races, and a coach who helps runners like you break through mental roadblocks, push past doubt, and run with confidence. Let’s go.
Welcome to episode 33. Today we're clearing up a misconception that's going to help you become unstoppable.
It's something I hear from a lot of runners when I first start working with them, and we're talking about what they want from coaching with me and the goal we're going to pursue together.
And here's how it sounds: you desperately want to finish your race, never DNF, hit your goal time, have the race you planned and trained for months. The stakes feel enormous because you've invested so much, and you might not race big that often. So you really want to make it count. You're determined to succeed, so you do everything you can think of to ensure a finish. And one of those things is getting mental strength, especially for a race that's really going to demand it of you.
What you think is, "Mental strength will prevent me from failing." So, you collect every tip you can find. The more strategies, the better. You work on mental training, visualization, positive self-talk, mantras, training in miserable conditions—everything that everybody tells you worked for them. You're sure that if you get mentally strong enough, you can protect yourself from failure and have the race you want.
But then race day comes and you don't finish, or you miss your goal, or everything just goes completely sideways. And you're not just disappointed about the race; you're also devastated because you believed that mental strength would insulate you from failure. So now you think you've failed both at the race and at mental strength. Either it didn't work, or you're just not a mentally strong person.
So, the tendency is to give up on mental training entirely. You tried it, it didn't work, so mental strength must be something that you just lack. And you'll have to accept that and work harder on your body, which is clearer and easier to do.
But here's what breaks my heart about this. When you do that, you miss out on all the real benefits of building mental strength, like stronger races, unshakable self-confidence, actually enjoying your races more, the deep satisfaction of solving tough challenges, and finally having the mind-blowing discovery that you're capable of so much more than you ever imagined.
But believing mental strength won't work for you isn't the real problem here. It's how you think mental strength will work for you. The real problem is thinking mental strength guarantees success, that it will protect you from failure, keep you safe from disappointment, and ensure the race finish you want. That's not what mental strength is for. That's not what mental strength does. Mental strength does something far more valuable than that.
So I'm going to start with the first myth that's keeping you stuck: the idea that being mentally strong guarantees success. It's simply not true. And here's why it's a myth. You can be the mentally strongest person in the world and still not finish. You can be mentally strong and still go out too fast, take a wrong turn, twist an ankle, make a rookie mistake, or even miss a cutoff.
For instance, I've started my last two races with an injury and DNFed both of them. Does that mean I'm not mentally strong? Of course not. I've finished 152 100-mile races on tough courses, often in brutal conditions. I know mental strength inside and out. And I also know that countless things can still derail a race that have nothing to do with your mental strength.
I had a client who attempted Palisades 100, one of the most challenging mountain races out there, and she dropped but came out of the experience far more confident, not less.
Why? Because she exercised tremendous mental strength by summoning the courage to attempt something incredibly difficult that felt way above her comfort level. And she kept going further in the race than she expected. She solved unexpected gear problems. She navigated difficult sections with a calm she didn't know she had. She managed the negative thinking that kept coming up throughout the race.
When she made the decision to stop before a section that she judged too dangerous for her at the time, she was amazed and proud of how far she'd gotten and how confidently she'd faced something that truly intimidated her. That DNF built mental strength; it didn't destroy it.
Think about it. Mentally strong people make pacing mistakes. Mentally strong people miss turns. Mentally strong people still have to deal with weather that's beyond their control. None of these factors negate their internal strength. Here's the point: mental strength does not make you immune to failure. It makes you willing to risk failure.
And now here's the flip side of this myth: you can succeed without being mentally strong. Think about finishing an easy race, say, a track 100-mile race with a super generous 48-hour cutoff. You could complete that without ever being truly tested mentally. You could just show up, move forward on a predictable course with generous time limits, not much risk of failure involved there.
And you might think, "Hey, great, that's exactly what I want. I need a sure finish to make me more confident." Yes, even low-risk success at a new distance gives you confidence that you can complete the distance, and that is incredibly valuable for a first step.
But it's all it gives you. It doesn't give you the strength to keep going when everything falls apart or when your brain is screaming that there's no hope or when you're only a handful of minutes ahead of cutoff. That's what you really want.
The reality is that success doesn't create mental strength. In fact, it's actually the opposite. Long-term success at races that take minimal mental strength can actually hurt your self-confidence.
Here's how: let's say you finish that easier race, which is great. But then you wonder in the back of your mind if you can do it again because deep down, you know finishing it didn't require much mental strength of you, and you aren't sure that you have what it takes to live up to that success, to repeat it, or to do better.
You just know that you moved forward for however many hours and finished that distance, but you weren't truly tested. You weren't forged. This is why it's easy to feel like a fraud because you got the success without earning the mental strength that you think comes with finishing races.
Here's what I see a lot of: clients who come to me who've finished a relatively easy 100-mile race, maybe several of them, and are now entered in a longer or harder race and want to catch up on mental strength. And I love helping these clients. That is my absolute jam. But we often have to start by undoing the shame of them thinking that because they've finished races, they should feel more mentally strong than they do.
So, if success doesn't automatically build mental strength, and mental strength doesn't guarantee success, what is mental strength actually for? That's where this gets really interesting.
Mental strength is not avoiding mistakes or pacing perfectly to plan or being fast. It's not even powering through a tough situation when it's smarter to stop. Sometimes, like me at Javelina 100 recently, it takes incredible mental strength to make the decision to drop when you desperately want to continue on with everybody else.
In that race, I wanted more than anything to keep running that race. I even gritted my teeth and took ten steps out on the next loop before turning around because I just physically couldn't do it. And I watched runners taking off on their second loops and continuing on without me. That was tough.
So here's what mental strength actually is: mental strength is your willingness to feel any negative emotion—fear, disappointment, anxiety, defeat, despair, embarrassment, humiliation, shame, crushing doubt—and still go for your goal. It's accepting these emotions and feeling them without needing to make them go away, without trying to distract yourself from them, without pretending they aren't there, and without dropping just to make them stop.
It's feeling those emotions, accepting that they're there, and going on with or in spite of them because you're certain of yourself. You know that you can trust yourself to handle the fear and follow through on what you commit to. And you know that nothing out there on the course can change how strong you are inside. You don't need a race finish to prove you're strong. You already know it.
Let me give you a concrete example. It's not your willingness to keep running in the pouring rain for hours. That's just the action. Mental strength is your willingness to feel all the emotions that come with that rain so you can run in the pouring rain for hours.
It's being willing to feel the dread of being cold and wet and miserable for hours, the frustration that your race isn't going the way you planned, the human resistance to discomfort when every instinct tells you to seek shelter, the anxiety about hypothermia or slipping or getting blisters, or conditions maybe even getting worse, the overwhelm of knowing that you're battling both the distance and the weather at the same time.
And here's the big one: the willingness to feel fear. As in fear of failing, fear of not being enough, fear of disappointing yourself or others. Being willing to face this fear instead of avoiding it and to calmly risk failing by going for a goal that you might not reach? More than anything else, that will make you unstoppable.
This is exactly why mental strength is infinitely more valuable than success. So, which one would you choose if you could only have one: success or mental strength?
I'm going to say mental strength, that it's infinitely better, and here's why. When you're mentally strong, you can handle anything that any race throws at you. When you need success, you're always worried that you won't succeed. That's what you're anxious about and what you're scared of. You're racing scared instead of racing free.
Mental strength gives you the ability to feel dread and resistance and anxiety, overwhelm in pursuit of your goal, while needing success makes you desperate to avoid or get rid of all those uncomfortable feelings.
Mental strength gives you the freedom to take on any race, not just the ones you're sure you can finish. You can sign up for that challenging mountain race, the race with the tight cutoffs, the one that scares you a little bit, the big race, because you want to see what you're made of. And to do that, you have to risk failing.
With mental strength, you can handle failure if it happens. You can feel strong with a DNF because you know you dared to go for it. But success without mental strength makes failure devastating because your entire sense of capability, your sense of yourself, is tied to an outcome that you can't completely control, instead of the internal strength that you always have control over.
This concept, this idea, can really change your racing experience. With mental strength, you spend less time and less effort obsessing over the outcome and whether you'll get it or not. You know you'll run your best, no matter how the race turns out. You're absolutely certain of it. You're totally in control of that. Your confidence isn't dependent on crossing a finish line; it's built on your own unshakable knowledge that you will face whatever comes and keep moving toward your goal.
So if finishing doesn't build mental strength, what actually does? Here's what might surprise you. Mental strength is built by willingly exposing yourself to all the negative emotions we face in races, but especially the fear of failure, because that's the biggest one we face.
It's not the act of running hours in the rain; it's being willing to expose yourself to the dread of running hours in the rain and have the self-control to continue and do it. To be willing to risk real failure and feel all the negative emotions that come with it. To accept that you might fail in any and every race you start.
You're absolutely going to do your utmost best to finish, of course. You're going to run your all-out best. But you might still fail. And you accept the potential for failure as a normal, natural thing that we all face in every race.
When I say fear of failure, I'm not talking about having one sacrificial DNF where you check a box and move on and say, "I had my DNF, okay, I'm good now." I'm talking about the willingness to feel that fear race after race, attempting things where failure is not just possible but likely, and to keep going even when hope seems unrealistic.
It's about being willing to feel dread and anxiety and overwhelm and doubt, and especially that deep fear of failure, as uncomfortable as all of that is, and still keep moving toward your goal anyway. This means continued exposure to races where failure is not just possible but likely.
You might have some tough DNFs, maybe a lot of them, maybe back-to-back, and you keep going anyway. Continued exposure to negative emotions, willing exposure to negative emotions like potential failure, when you use it to learn and get stronger instead of beating yourself up, that builds unshakable mental strength.
It's the continued willingness to feel high levels of negative emotion to go for what you want. As you don't give up, you keep learning and keep refining your approach even when there seems to be no hope, even when other people would quit, even when other people think you should quit, that's what builds unshakable mental strength.
I DNFed several 100-mile races early on and had several clients who had back-to-back DNFs, sometimes three or more in a row. And we all came out stronger and more successful on the other side because we had discovered that we could handle failure and we could learn and improve even faster from facing those emotions.
Those safe races that you know you can finish? They're great. They're fun. I enjoy them. And sometimes they're exactly what you need. But finishing them doesn't build the mental strength you want. Comfort doesn't forge strength, challenge does. Working through tough trail courses does, racing at the high end of your endurance does, digging deep when you know you have some left in the tank, but you could just still finish without having to dig deep.
Risk creates resilience. The willingness to fail and feel all that doubt and anxiety builds the capacity to succeed when it really matters.
Think about it this way: every time you attempt something with the real risk of failure, you're making a deposit in your mental strength account. Every time you choose only the safe races that you know you can finish, you're not making a withdrawal, but you're also not building anything either. So here's my question for you, and I want you to really take this one and think about your answer. If you could only have one, success or mental strength, which would you choose and why?
Because once you really see that mental strength is more valuable to you than any single race finish, you become unstoppable. You stop racing from this desperate need for success. You start racing from a place of curiosity and daring, wondering what you're capable of discovering about yourself and being willing to find out.
You stop asking, "Will I finish?" and you start asking, "What adventure am I going to have today? What puzzle am I going to solve out there on the race? What challenge do I get to overcome today?"
You stop needing the race to go perfectly, and you start being willing to see what happens because you know you can handle whatever comes. It's the difference between racing not to lose and racing to win, racing to avoid a DNF versus racing to see how strong you really are. That shift from racing scared to racing free, from needing an outcome to building unstoppable confidence in yourself, it completely changes how you show up on race day.
Here's what I want you to remember: mental strength doesn't guarantee you'll succeed. It's infinitely better than that. Mental strength frees you to pursue any goal because you're willing to feel any emotion to get there.
You don't need race finishes to prove you're strong, and that's not how it works. The real transformation is developing internal mental strength, that dependable certainty in yourself that you feel and trust, no matter what happens at the finish line.
All right, you all. That's this week's episode. Thank you for listening. If you know somebody who could use this, share it with them. It might be exactly what they need to hear. See you all next week. Bye.
Thanks for listening to Unstoppable Ultra Runner. If you want more ultra talk, mindset tools, and strategies for running with confidence, visit www.susanidonnelly.com. This podcast receives production support from the team at Digital Freedom Productions. That’s it for today’s episode. See you next week.
Welcome to Unstoppable Ultra Runner, the podcast for ultra runners who refuse to let anything hold them back. I’m your host, Susan Donnelly, veteran of over 150 100-mile races, and a coach who helps runners like you break through mental roadblocks, push past doubt, and run with confidence. Let’s go.
Welcome to episode 33. Today we're clearing up a misconception that's going to help you become unstoppable.
It's something I hear from a lot of runners when I first start working with them, and we're talking about what they want from coaching with me and the goal we're going to pursue together.
And here's how it sounds: you desperately want to finish your race, never DNF, hit your goal time, have the race you planned and trained for months. The stakes feel enormous because you've invested so much, and you might not race big that often. So you really want to make it count. You're determined to succeed, so you do everything you can think of to ensure a finish. And one of those things is getting mental strength, especially for a race that's really going to demand it of you.
What you think is, "Mental strength will prevent me from failing." So, you collect every tip you can find. The more strategies, the better. You work on mental training, visualization, positive self-talk, mantras, training in miserable conditions—everything that everybody tells you worked for them. You're sure that if you get mentally strong enough, you can protect yourself from failure and have the race you want.
But then race day comes and you don't finish, or you miss your goal, or everything just goes completely sideways. And you're not just disappointed about the race; you're also devastated because you believed that mental strength would insulate you from failure. So now you think you've failed both at the race and at mental strength. Either it didn't work, or you're just not a mentally strong person.
So, the tendency is to give up on mental training entirely. You tried it, it didn't work, so mental strength must be something that you just lack. And you'll have to accept that and work harder on your body, which is clearer and easier to do.
But here's what breaks my heart about this. When you do that, you miss out on all the real benefits of building mental strength, like stronger races, unshakable self-confidence, actually enjoying your races more, the deep satisfaction of solving tough challenges, and finally having the mind-blowing discovery that you're capable of so much more than you ever imagined.
But believing mental strength won't work for you isn't the real problem here. It's how you think mental strength will work for you. The real problem is thinking mental strength guarantees success, that it will protect you from failure, keep you safe from disappointment, and ensure the race finish you want. That's not what mental strength is for. That's not what mental strength does. Mental strength does something far more valuable than that.
So I'm going to start with the first myth that's keeping you stuck: the idea that being mentally strong guarantees success. It's simply not true. And here's why it's a myth. You can be the mentally strongest person in the world and still not finish. You can be mentally strong and still go out too fast, take a wrong turn, twist an ankle, make a rookie mistake, or even miss a cutoff.
For instance, I've started my last two races with an injury and DNFed both of them. Does that mean I'm not mentally strong? Of course not. I've finished 152 100-mile races on tough courses, often in brutal conditions. I know mental strength inside and out. And I also know that countless things can still derail a race that have nothing to do with your mental strength.
I had a client who attempted Palisades 100, one of the most challenging mountain races out there, and she dropped but came out of the experience far more confident, not less.
Why? Because she exercised tremendous mental strength by summoning the courage to attempt something incredibly difficult that felt way above her comfort level. And she kept going further in the race than she expected. She solved unexpected gear problems. She navigated difficult sections with a calm she didn't know she had. She managed the negative thinking that kept coming up throughout the race.
When she made the decision to stop before a section that she judged too dangerous for her at the time, she was amazed and proud of how far she'd gotten and how confidently she'd faced something that truly intimidated her. That DNF built mental strength; it didn't destroy it.
Think about it. Mentally strong people make pacing mistakes. Mentally strong people miss turns. Mentally strong people still have to deal with weather that's beyond their control. None of these factors negate their internal strength. Here's the point: mental strength does not make you immune to failure. It makes you willing to risk failure.
And now here's the flip side of this myth: you can succeed without being mentally strong. Think about finishing an easy race, say, a track 100-mile race with a super generous 48-hour cutoff. You could complete that without ever being truly tested mentally. You could just show up, move forward on a predictable course with generous time limits, not much risk of failure involved there.
And you might think, "Hey, great, that's exactly what I want. I need a sure finish to make me more confident." Yes, even low-risk success at a new distance gives you confidence that you can complete the distance, and that is incredibly valuable for a first step.
But it's all it gives you. It doesn't give you the strength to keep going when everything falls apart or when your brain is screaming that there's no hope or when you're only a handful of minutes ahead of cutoff. That's what you really want.
The reality is that success doesn't create mental strength. In fact, it's actually the opposite. Long-term success at races that take minimal mental strength can actually hurt your self-confidence.
Here's how: let's say you finish that easier race, which is great. But then you wonder in the back of your mind if you can do it again because deep down, you know finishing it didn't require much mental strength of you, and you aren't sure that you have what it takes to live up to that success, to repeat it, or to do better.
You just know that you moved forward for however many hours and finished that distance, but you weren't truly tested. You weren't forged. This is why it's easy to feel like a fraud because you got the success without earning the mental strength that you think comes with finishing races.
Here's what I see a lot of: clients who come to me who've finished a relatively easy 100-mile race, maybe several of them, and are now entered in a longer or harder race and want to catch up on mental strength. And I love helping these clients. That is my absolute jam. But we often have to start by undoing the shame of them thinking that because they've finished races, they should feel more mentally strong than they do.
So, if success doesn't automatically build mental strength, and mental strength doesn't guarantee success, what is mental strength actually for? That's where this gets really interesting.
Mental strength is not avoiding mistakes or pacing perfectly to plan or being fast. It's not even powering through a tough situation when it's smarter to stop. Sometimes, like me at Javelina 100 recently, it takes incredible mental strength to make the decision to drop when you desperately want to continue on with everybody else.
In that race, I wanted more than anything to keep running that race. I even gritted my teeth and took ten steps out on the next loop before turning around because I just physically couldn't do it. And I watched runners taking off on their second loops and continuing on without me. That was tough.
So here's what mental strength actually is: mental strength is your willingness to feel any negative emotion—fear, disappointment, anxiety, defeat, despair, embarrassment, humiliation, shame, crushing doubt—and still go for your goal. It's accepting these emotions and feeling them without needing to make them go away, without trying to distract yourself from them, without pretending they aren't there, and without dropping just to make them stop.
It's feeling those emotions, accepting that they're there, and going on with or in spite of them because you're certain of yourself. You know that you can trust yourself to handle the fear and follow through on what you commit to. And you know that nothing out there on the course can change how strong you are inside. You don't need a race finish to prove you're strong. You already know it.
Let me give you a concrete example. It's not your willingness to keep running in the pouring rain for hours. That's just the action. Mental strength is your willingness to feel all the emotions that come with that rain so you can run in the pouring rain for hours.
It's being willing to feel the dread of being cold and wet and miserable for hours, the frustration that your race isn't going the way you planned, the human resistance to discomfort when every instinct tells you to seek shelter, the anxiety about hypothermia or slipping or getting blisters, or conditions maybe even getting worse, the overwhelm of knowing that you're battling both the distance and the weather at the same time.
And here's the big one: the willingness to feel fear. As in fear of failing, fear of not being enough, fear of disappointing yourself or others. Being willing to face this fear instead of avoiding it and to calmly risk failing by going for a goal that you might not reach? More than anything else, that will make you unstoppable.
This is exactly why mental strength is infinitely more valuable than success. So, which one would you choose if you could only have one: success or mental strength?
I'm going to say mental strength, that it's infinitely better, and here's why. When you're mentally strong, you can handle anything that any race throws at you. When you need success, you're always worried that you won't succeed. That's what you're anxious about and what you're scared of. You're racing scared instead of racing free.
Mental strength gives you the ability to feel dread and resistance and anxiety, overwhelm in pursuit of your goal, while needing success makes you desperate to avoid or get rid of all those uncomfortable feelings.
Mental strength gives you the freedom to take on any race, not just the ones you're sure you can finish. You can sign up for that challenging mountain race, the race with the tight cutoffs, the one that scares you a little bit, the big race, because you want to see what you're made of. And to do that, you have to risk failing.
With mental strength, you can handle failure if it happens. You can feel strong with a DNF because you know you dared to go for it. But success without mental strength makes failure devastating because your entire sense of capability, your sense of yourself, is tied to an outcome that you can't completely control, instead of the internal strength that you always have control over.
This concept, this idea, can really change your racing experience. With mental strength, you spend less time and less effort obsessing over the outcome and whether you'll get it or not. You know you'll run your best, no matter how the race turns out. You're absolutely certain of it. You're totally in control of that. Your confidence isn't dependent on crossing a finish line; it's built on your own unshakable knowledge that you will face whatever comes and keep moving toward your goal.
So if finishing doesn't build mental strength, what actually does? Here's what might surprise you. Mental strength is built by willingly exposing yourself to all the negative emotions we face in races, but especially the fear of failure, because that's the biggest one we face.
It's not the act of running hours in the rain; it's being willing to expose yourself to the dread of running hours in the rain and have the self-control to continue and do it. To be willing to risk real failure and feel all the negative emotions that come with it. To accept that you might fail in any and every race you start.
You're absolutely going to do your utmost best to finish, of course. You're going to run your all-out best. But you might still fail. And you accept the potential for failure as a normal, natural thing that we all face in every race.
When I say fear of failure, I'm not talking about having one sacrificial DNF where you check a box and move on and say, "I had my DNF, okay, I'm good now." I'm talking about the willingness to feel that fear race after race, attempting things where failure is not just possible but likely, and to keep going even when hope seems unrealistic.
It's about being willing to feel dread and anxiety and overwhelm and doubt, and especially that deep fear of failure, as uncomfortable as all of that is, and still keep moving toward your goal anyway. This means continued exposure to races where failure is not just possible but likely.
You might have some tough DNFs, maybe a lot of them, maybe back-to-back, and you keep going anyway. Continued exposure to negative emotions, willing exposure to negative emotions like potential failure, when you use it to learn and get stronger instead of beating yourself up, that builds unshakable mental strength.
It's the continued willingness to feel high levels of negative emotion to go for what you want. As you don't give up, you keep learning and keep refining your approach even when there seems to be no hope, even when other people would quit, even when other people think you should quit, that's what builds unshakable mental strength.
I DNFed several 100-mile races early on and had several clients who had back-to-back DNFs, sometimes three or more in a row. And we all came out stronger and more successful on the other side because we had discovered that we could handle failure and we could learn and improve even faster from facing those emotions.
Those safe races that you know you can finish? They're great. They're fun. I enjoy them. And sometimes they're exactly what you need. But finishing them doesn't build the mental strength you want. Comfort doesn't forge strength, challenge does. Working through tough trail courses does, racing at the high end of your endurance does, digging deep when you know you have some left in the tank, but you could just still finish without having to dig deep.
Risk creates resilience. The willingness to fail and feel all that doubt and anxiety builds the capacity to succeed when it really matters.
Think about it this way: every time you attempt something with the real risk of failure, you're making a deposit in your mental strength account. Every time you choose only the safe races that you know you can finish, you're not making a withdrawal, but you're also not building anything either. So here's my question for you, and I want you to really take this one and think about your answer. If you could only have one, success or mental strength, which would you choose and why?
Because once you really see that mental strength is more valuable to you than any single race finish, you become unstoppable. You stop racing from this desperate need for success. You start racing from a place of curiosity and daring, wondering what you're capable of discovering about yourself and being willing to find out.
You stop asking, "Will I finish?" and you start asking, "What adventure am I going to have today? What puzzle am I going to solve out there on the race? What challenge do I get to overcome today?"
You stop needing the race to go perfectly, and you start being willing to see what happens because you know you can handle whatever comes. It's the difference between racing not to lose and racing to win, racing to avoid a DNF versus racing to see how strong you really are. That shift from racing scared to racing free, from needing an outcome to building unstoppable confidence in yourself, it completely changes how you show up on race day.
Here's what I want you to remember: mental strength doesn't guarantee you'll succeed. It's infinitely better than that. Mental strength frees you to pursue any goal because you're willing to feel any emotion to get there.
You don't need race finishes to prove you're strong, and that's not how it works. The real transformation is developing internal mental strength, that dependable certainty in yourself that you feel and trust, no matter what happens at the finish line.
All right, you all. That's this week's episode. Thank you for listening. If you know somebody who could use this, share it with them. It might be exactly what they need to hear. See you all next week. Bye.
Thanks for listening to Unstoppable Ultra Runner. If you want more ultra talk, mindset tools, and strategies for running with confidence, visit www.susanidonnelly.com. This podcast receives production support from the team at Digital Freedom Productions. That’s it for today’s episode. See you next week.
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